Michael McGirr’s new book deals with all things sleep-related: dreams, nightmares, sedatives, stimulants, narcolepsy, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder and even homelessness.
“Snooze: The Lost Art of Sleep”
by Michael McGirr
Pegasus Books, 306 pp., $26.95
“There’s more to sleep than meets the eye.”So says Australian author Michael McGirr after his doctor diagnoses him with obstructive sleep apnea, a condition in which sleepers’ throats close up, depriving them of oxygen and raising the CO2 levels in their blood to hazardous levels. “The loud spluttering, strangling, gargling noise that passes as snoring is actually your attempt to push the palate and tonsils out of the way, open the throat, and clear the airway,” McGirr explains. “The noise sounds desperate, and it is. You are struggling for life and you don’t even know.”
McGirr uses his own ailment as the launchpad for this eclectic study of all things sleep-related, bringing his own curious personal history into it while he’s at it. A former Jesuit priest who left the order to marry and have children, McGirr is a man of letters who has a wild and woolly way with his erudition. Plato, Virgil, Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Edison, Margaret Thatcher and others all turn up in his wide-ranging study.
His loving account of life with his family — including the years of sleep deprivation he and his wife dealt with when raising young children — gives “Snooze: The Lost Art of Sleep” its big heart.
Dreams, nightmares, sedatives, stimulants, narcolepsy, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder and even homelessness all come under his gaze. (“One of the basic signs of a coherent life,” he points out, “is the knowledge of where you are going to sleep.”) He compares how humans sleep to how animals sleep. He notes how other societies cope with that post-lunch lull we all feel: “The cultural practice of the siesta originates less in a need to escape hot weather and more in a willingness to honour what the body wants to do anyway.”
And what does the body do?
“If you ask an anthropologist, human sleep evolved to keep our ancestors safely in their caves at night away from nocturnal predators,” McGirr says. “If you ask a developmental physiologist, sleep … could be a hangover of circuit-testing in the foetus when dreams and dreamlike activity are important for helping a brain discover what it can do.”
The neurochemical replenishment of the brain and the repair of body tissue are part of the picture, too. Psychiatrists argue that sleep — especially REM sleep when we dream — is “all about memory consolidation and the reprocessing of information.”
Bad things can happen if we don’t get enough sleep.
The book’s prose can be both enjoyably fanciful (“A horse at sleep is a statue of itself”) and soberly poetic.
“Sleep has a cavernous memory,” McGirr writes in a passage on sleep disturbances in PTSD sufferers. “It holds on to things that, rationally, we may prefer to let go. This is what a nightmare does.”
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